Meet Victoria.
At almost 3 years old, Victoria is a little spark of exuberance who loves to dance and swim. Like many toddlers, she gets excited about many things while she explores her little world everyday with her family!
Victoria and her family came to KidsAbility for an infant hearing test just days after she was born. She wasn't responding to sound. After an initial assessment at our clinic, a referral to an audiologist confirmed the diagnosis of profound hearing loss. Her parents were devastated.
“On the ride home from her appointment, I grieved for our daughter’s unknown future," shares her mother, Tania. "I wondered how she would ever manage in a world without sound.”
Within days, Victoria and her family began their journey with KidsAbility and found hope, optimism and confidence.
Working together with the entire family, Victoria's speech-language therapist, Heather, created a plan to make their goals possible during the time they navigated her surgery to receive cochlear implants placed by the hospital.
With ongoing clinical expertise from KidsAbility teams, Victoria explores a life filled with sound! From those early days to now, she continues to learn the words to describe her toddler world – the colour of a banana, a pig, the sky – and play therapy games to identify and fill in the missing words in nursery rhymes.
"She loves her therapy. It's so fun for her that she's unaware that she's learning to improve her words, sounds and rhythm!" Tania explains.
Therapy sessions are an opportunity for her parents to learn new resources and reach milestones, too. Heather demonstrates how to tap out each spoken word on their arm to emphasis its syllables. This helps her understand and repeat the word
correctly. Some harder sounds, such as “f”, “th”
and “v", are especially important for Victoria to learn so she can pronounce her name with confidence.
“Thank you to everybody at KidsAbility for letting us be part of that family, and to the generous donors who give to keep services going that Victoria and other children benefit from.”